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The Spanish CLARIN Knowledge Centre

Submitted by Jakob Lenardič on

Written by Ainara Estarrona, Mikel Iruskieta, German Rigau, and Núria Bel; edited by Darja Fišer and Jakob Lenardič.

The Spanish CLARIN K-Centre was the first CLARIN K-Centre to be established. In 2015, CLARIN granted the K-Centre recognition to three research groups that decided to work together as a distributed centre with the aim of supporting research in all the languages of Spain. Initially the Spanish K-Centre covered Spanish, Basque and Catalan, but soon after a Galician specialist research group joined the centre.

Thus, the Spanish CLARIN K-Centre brings together the specialities of the following four nodes or groups with complementary skills and experience:

  • IULA-UPF-CCC (UPF Barcelona) specializes in Text Analytics and Language Technologies and Resources. This Centre offers services to researchers working with textual data, especially in Spanish and Catalan. This group has led Spain's participation in CLARIN as a natural language processing web service provider. It has developed several web applications, such as ContaWords. It also provides web service access to tools for enriching texts with syntactic dependencies, part-of-speech tagging and named-entity recognition using the open source language analysis tool suite FreeLing.
  • LINDH (UNED Madrid) is a research centre on Digital Humanities that works as a hub for innovation, consultancy and training to support researchers and projects in Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries.
  • The IXA group (UPV/EHU Donostia-San Sebastián) is a multidisciplinary team that includes members of different research areas at the University of the Basque Country, such as linguists, computer scientists, and educators. It is specialized in Text Analytics and Language Technologies and Resources and offers services to researchers working with Basque, Spanish and English. It has developed more than 20 tools, some of which have been reused and redesigned for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences researchers who have requested technical support through the CLARIN K-Centre. An example of such a tool is ANALHITZA, which is a user-friendly web service for the general linguistic analysis of Basque, Spanish, and English.
  • TALG (UVigo, Vigo) specializes in the development of digital language resources for facilitating the use of Galician, its translation, study, and learning in the contemporary digital framework. TALG has developed the automatic analyser DContado, which helps researchers extract linguistic information from texts in Spanish, Galician, and English.

The Spanish CLARIN K-centre supports an average of five requests per year from postdoctoral researchers and senior researchers in a variety of topics, such as poetry analysis, identification of linguistic features for detecting fraud, analysis of bilingual child corpora, and representing discourse relations in political debates. In addition to creating user-friendly tools like ANALHITZA and DContado, the K-Centre has also participated in several summer schools and the development of teaching materials for promoting the benefits of the CLARIN infrastructure.

The Spanish CLARIN K-Centre has supported the creation of a strategic research network, INTELE, in order to promote the participation of Spain in CLARIN as well as other European infrastructures like DARIAH. The INTELE network aims to reduce the digital divide in Spain by promoting new lines of multidisciplinary research in the Humanities and Social Sciences and by participating in their digital transformation with the help of language technologies. The seven research groups and universities involved in INTELE are the following:

The specific objectives of the INTELE network are to coordinate and organize the activities of the seven research groups in order to support and foster the interest and use of the CLARIN and DARIAH infrastructures for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, encourage meetings between researchers working in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, and create a catalogue of tools and use cases made by researchers working with Spanish and the co-official languages Basque, Catalan-Valencian and Galician. INTELE also aims to promote the collaboration and the internationalization of the seven Spanish research groups, so that Spain can become a member of the European infrastructures CLARIN and DARIAH.


The kick-off meeting of INTELE.

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